Anant-Observations

Sunday, September 30, 2018

I am thankful to the members of CHEP and the new Chair, Justin for having
organized this event to mark the change in Chairmanship of the Centre.

I would like to recall an occasion take took place at the end of the Lattice 2000
workshop, an international conference that was organized by Apoorva Patel in IISc.
When it came to the time of the workshop's closing event, Apoorva had to make
the valedictory speech. He began by saying that he came from a small place and
was not taught how to make speeches. Instead, he narrated a folk tale from his
place, where a not so well-off person was asked to organize a party. He organized
it in a courtyard and the revellers were asked to take off their footwear and jackets
and leave them outside and were all given handheld fans as it was a hot day.
The rest of the evening was with the revellers talking to one another and they had a great
time. There is an ending to this story that I will not mention now, but only at the end
of my speech. The main moral of this anecdote is that the party is what the revellers
made it, and all that the organizer provided was the space and the handheld fan.
The other moral is that it is not always necessary to make speeches! In the course
of the 3520 days that began on January 27, 2009 and ended on September 17, 2018,
I have made numerous speeches and so I cannot claim that I was never learnt to
make speeches! But I have learnt that the fate of most speeches is that they essentially
fall on deaf ears. I have also made numerous sermons in writing and unless you have
deleted them, you will have them in your email accounts. Jokes apart, in most of
the speeches and sermons I have tried to emphasize that we have a special responsibility
as members of an important department of the country's most reputed Institution.
This will be a statement that is invariant under who is the Chair and who is not.

The job of the Chair is not an enviable one. He or she has to constantly keep in mind
that general good and works under tremendous constraints, coming from financial
as well as physical constraints. If the guiding principle is of the general good, and that
one has to optimize the use of scarce resources, and that one is within the ambit of the
law and convention, and common sense then most decisions are the natural ones.
It is also a fact that not everyone will be happy, and being the Chair is not the surest
way of winning a popularity poll. That said, it is the part of our Service Rules that
duties can be assigned by Authority from time to time and the employee is bound
to serve by them. Thus, popularity or not, one has to discharge one's duties
irrespective of the nature of these, should the Authority vest such responsibility in us.
It is with this view that I served these 3520 days. What has been achieved or not,
time and history will tell, and the past is now firmly behind us. At this point, I need to
thank Directors Balaram and Anurag Kumar and Divisional Chair Rahul Pandit for
having vested the responsibility in me. To their eternal credit and I thank them for this,
I have never had a decision overturned. All the above, also begs the question as to
why I conveyed my desire to step down on August 3, 2018 by email to Rahul.
The reasons are many-fold. Primarily, I feel that we had reached a stage when
the Centre needed new leadership. Any organization reaches a stage when the
management runs out of steam. Also, by staying on I would have denied the
opportunity to the members of CHEP to benefit from new ideas and new directions.
While I will continue to be a member of the department would be happy to offer
any help, it was really necessary for the department to get a second wind after
the period of growth and consolidation.

I also thank all the members of CHEP, past
and present, since there was never an instance when there was complaint against
one member against another. I think this is a remarkable achievement and I commend
all of you on this and I hope that Justin will also have smooth sailing in this regard.
I thank all of you who have helped me one way or another, psychologically or physically,
through your participation in discussions and counselling me, serving on committees
and in general being good colleagues. The only person I wish to thank by name is
Mr. Keshava, because without him I could not have done a day's work. During these
3520 days, I do not recall a single occasion on which he let me down.

With these words, I take the opportunity to once again thank all of you for
having been the revellers.

P. S.: the ending to the story is that when the revellers decided to wind down
and go home, they found their footwear and jackets had been sold off by the
organizer!

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

I am thankful to the Students' Council for inviting me to present this talk.
The invitation letter I received on August 15, stated the following:
``
Communication skills are essential for any scientist or researcher in order to be able to convey his/her ideas to the rest of the community. Writing research papers is also not an easy task and one needs to acquire the necessary skills to be able to write papers of an internationally acceptable standard. These two skills are often areas in which many scientists are found wanting, which makes a formal training in these aspects necessary.''
I promptly accepted the invitation by email, although I did not know how they even
knew about me, and why they thought that I was the correct person to give this talk.
The reasons could be that I recently gave a small presentation at the Memorial Meeting
they organized for Stephen Hawking, and also because I am quite active on Facebook.
Of course, I have been a teacher in IISc for over 21 years and do mix with students.
By mentioning all these almost obvious things, I would like to
draw your attention to the multiple aspects of communication that are already involved
here. We live in an era of multiple modes of communication, personal as well electronic
on a scale never known before. While 15 minutes is not a whole lot of time,
I will not spend time on the general aspects of communication and of technical writing,
but would rather concentrate on the specific problems that face us as people of India
in these spheres, and how we can find solutions, and also in the setting of IISc.
Many of the problems that I will talk about are quite
general but if you were to develop a sense of self-appraisal and self-awareness,
you can solve them without too much difficulty. The first hit on google for the
word communication gives the meaning `the imparting or exchanging of information
by speaking, writing, or using some other medium.' One of the points that I would like to specifically draw your
attention to is that communication is an Input-Output process.
In technical parlance, there is a sender and a receiver for every message.
It is important to put yourself in the shoes of the receiver and to ask critically
whether your message has been received uncorrupted, or with the correct
connotation, and that the connotation has not changed because of lack
of clarity or due to ambiguity, or due plain and simple mistakes of transcription
or enunciation. Furthermore, I would like to mention
that communication skills includes both trying to understand what others are
conveying, and to convey information in the most precise of terms.
Keeping in mind that we are a multi-cultural, multi-linguistic society, we must understand
that idioms and nuances that one may be accustomed to in one's own milieu may
not translate into the same in another's. It is important to have an open mind
and to communicate in as simple and as universal terms as possible, especially since
we in the Indian Institute of Science. For many of you, this may be the first instance
of your leaving home and a protected environment, and you are facing
the big bad world for the first time. Thus, you are facing multiple challenges and
communicating under these circumstances can be quite a challenge.
Communication in a complex setting like in
a laboratory or in a classroom, or in a hostel or in a gymkhana setting, includes not
just verbal communication but also of body language, and other forms of non-verbal
communication. Young people must learn to receive multiple signals and develop a sensitivity
to the diversity of expression. The above said, communication between teacher and
student, between supervisor and scholar are of special significance, indeed as are communications between fellow students, as well as with other members of faculty
and the community. These can be quite different, and can be challenging. It is best to
exercise caution in communication in such scenarii and it is also best to keep in
mind that discretion is the better part of valour.
For purposes of scientific communication, one cannot overemphasize the importance
of the English
language. It is important to master oral as well as written English. A strong command
of grammar and vocabulary are an integral part of communication. Let us note that
communication is both auditory as well as visual. In terms of talks and presentations,
there are now enormous resources for word processing, with all kinds of aids such
as embedded movies, simulations, pictures, figures, histograms, pie-charts and
so on. You could also communicate your work by posters, or on the internet
via a blog or facebooks posts or on twitter or instagram.
There are plenty of online guides on how to make presentations effective.
In this context, you must keep in mind your audience and tune your message
suitably. The level and complexity of ideas and presentation must be tuned
keeping in mind the parameters of the technical ability of your audience
and the training of the audience itself. You must learn to give talks first within your
own groups and listen to one another critically and help one another.
In terms of oral communication, please
do note that listeners will not always be patient with strong accents that they are not
accustomed to. While there is no human being will not have an accent, each of us must
make an attempt to have oneself understood. The purpose of language is be
understood and to understand. It is a matter of training to achieve these goals
and it is better to start early.
The crucial aspects of presentation skills are precision and economy.
You must point out the state of the art of a particular research problem,
and describe the novelty
of your own work, and present the breakthroughs in your research.
Practice makes perfect, and indeed you
will not be able to give a good presentation or talk unless you are on top of your subject.
In order to be top of the subject, one must go after it with great energy and dedication
and commitment. Veterans in the subject can immediately figure out when a speaker
knows what he or she is talking about, and are rarely fooled by fluff. It is the subject
matter that will capture the moment, which must be the core of any presentation or talk
or poster, but supplemented with excellent language skills.
Note that future employers, as well as examiners
are always impressed by sincerity and clarity.
One aspect that I will emphasize here is that in science, it is best to be as
honest and upfront as possible.
To say `I do not know the answer' to a question is better than to hazard an unreasonable
guess, or give an answer that the veteran listener would immediately know to be untrue.
Many of the principles enunciated above can also be translated effectively into technical writing.
It is important
to be concise and crisp, and to the point. You could imitate the style of
Ernest Hemmingway who was the master of this.
Let me again emphasize that in scientific writing, you are not competing
in an essay writing competition. But rather you are writing in such a way
that the reader and other members of the community are struck by the
importance of your scientific work.
Most papers
today are organized along the lines of an abstract, introduction, formalism and state of knowledge, the new technique or equipment, results coming out of the new technique
or instrumental measurements, modelling the data and interpretation, and validation
in terms of a model or support to a new model or furthering a new model, followed
by discussion and conclusions. Clarity and simplicity,
along with precision and excellent language skills, without unnecessary verbiage will
make a paper acceptable even to the most critical referee and reviewer. It is a good
idea to never hide details, and be as upfront as possible with all the assumptions
that have gone into your work. Being secretive and telling half-truths brings
out the worst in reviewers and referees. Note that you will often be at the
mercy of editors and referees and it is best to win them over to your side.
Paying attention to detail and meticulousness will also assist in you getting your papers accepted.
Of great importance are Acknowledgements,where
you honestly and truthfully acknowledge all those who have helped you.
Of equal equal importance are
the bibliography and references. This latter also requires a lot of devotion, in order
to accredit to one's academic predecessors their due contributions. One of the things
that I have observed in IISc in the generations of students that I am acquainted with
is that they do not pay enough attention to the authors, whose papers they use
and cite. It is not easy to remember names of those from other cultures
and other countries, but it is an integral part of our work to cite the literature properly.
It is also worth developing good work habits, keeping an online diary or journal that
you update every day, or couple of times a week, keeping track of your bibliography
and making detailed notes on your work, be it laboratory work or your calculations,
electronically or otherwise. When you want to actually put together all your work,
this would come in handy. Also, developing a resource base of this type, would
make your eventual thesis writing so much simpler. In order to meet the objectives
laid out earlier, a lot of ground work and constant hardwork will come in handy,
and will lead to a good use of your time.
Please note that DST has also advertised a scheme recently that encourages scholars
to write about their work and popularize it. I quote from the blurb on the recently
launched AWSAR programme:
``
If you are a PhD scholar or a post-doc, you surely want to relate your work to the larger context of Science and Society and convey it to the people in a way that enhances their understanding, appreciation and excitement for science while giving you an opportunity (AWSAR) to maybe even win some cool prizes!''
With these words, I wish you all a great stay in IISc, lots of learning and lots of
results, which I would like to see written up and talked about!
Some resources:
See talk by Dani Or on `Introduction to Scientific Communication', and
Caltech site that has a manual on principles of scientific writing.

Saturday, October 31, 2015

As you all know from mails and from my facebook posts, I am bereft of one of my earliest students.
Imsong had just accepted a position in IIT Guwahati and while transiting through Bangalore, was taken
seriously ill and in septic shock from which he never came out. His publications can be found on INSPIRE.
A recent tribute to him is
here. I have never seen
such an outpouring of grief, solidarity and wishes as I have seen from responses to the facebook post, emails,
phone calls to me and to my other students and his well-wishers. It is best to honour him by emulating his
sincerity, simplicity and honesty. The tragedy is that in all honesty, Imsong had real child-like simplicity.
I repeat below words from our close collaborator Dr. Irinel Caprini:
``I can't belive that Imsong is no longer in this world... It's a pity
that such a good, kind, honest and clever boy died so soon and in such
tragic circumstances. '' I can hardly put it better myself.

Balasubramanian Ananthanarayan, a Professor at the Indian Institute of Science and Chairman of the Centre for High Energy Physics, is one of the most prominent researchers in the field of elementary particle physics and field theory. He is currently working on improving the predictions of low energy and developing an effective theory of the standard model, and also on searches for physics beyond the standard model.

“Curiosity about the integrity of the theories we have and to test them at the extremes of precision and logical consistency, is the main motivation in this exciting field,” says Dr. Ananthanarayan. The beauty and simplicity of ideas and the possibility of transcending man-made phenomena is what attracted him to this field. For years, among other topics, he has been involved in developing the theory of unitarity bounds to obtain precise information on form factors (which are the basic observables in the forces and confinement of particles in Physics), which is a crucial test of the theory of strong interactions. He has collaborated with Dr. Irinel Caprini from Bucharest on this subject along with co-workers at IISc. He has also been working extensively on collider physics in the recent years. Recall that the Higgs boson and its properties are sought after by most physicists all over the world. This is because it was the missing key in standard physics which can explain all the fundamental particles and forces. The project of collider physics is basically for the intense research on this particle, besides trying to discover new particles.

Dr. Ananthanarayan completed his bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1985. After this, he decided to change tracks and went on to pursue a Master of Science in Physics at the University of Delaware, Newark, USA. Then he completed his PhD in Physics in the same university in 1991, under the supervision of Prof. Qaisar Shafi.

Dr. Ananthanarayan recollects the interesting experiences he had changing his subject of study to physics. “Undoubtedly a very risky decision to have taken, I did set about it quite methodically. I registered for 3 courses of the M.Sc. in Physics program and went through the course work meticulously,” says Dr. Ananthanarayan. There was no internet those days, so he had to write to some US universities for their course booklets. “I basically drew mental Venn diagrams and isolated those courses which defined a basic minimum. Many long hours were spent in the IIT Madras library looking up textbooks spelt out in those course booklets and simply sitting down and working out missing steps and learning the basics. I must also emphasize that one great skill I did learn from the B. Tech. at IIT Madras was problem solving, a skill that is useful whether one goes in physics, managements, finance, computer science, IAS or what have you,” adds Dr. Ananthanarayan.

He believes that anyone can identify their weaknesses and work on them by putting themselves in a structured routine and emerge as a better student, if not as an expert. He presents his story as an example to all those who are thinking twice about taking a risk in their careers and says, “The moral of this story is that if this worked for me, it will work for anyone. Such professional physicists, for that matter scientists and engineers, are the need of the hour for the country.”

Dr. Ananthanarayan has worked as a post-doctoral fellow at three institutions, namely, Physical Reseach Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India; University of Lausanne, Switzerland and University of Bern, Switzerland. After this, he joined IISc as an Assistant Professor. He was awarded the Fellowship of the Homi Bhabha Fellowships Council in November 2009 - 2011. He has now received the prestigious “Rustum Choksi Award for Excellence in Research for the year 2014” from the IISc Court. On receiving the award, he modestly says, “The recognition of academic excellence by my employer, the leading institution in the country, and recognition of this by the Institute Management and senior colleagues is the main value of this award.”

Dr. Ananthanarayan wishes to dedicate his achievements to all his elders who have acted as a strong support system in his life. “Acknowledgements are also due, to the kind advice, help and encouragement of my teachers , Profs. V. Balakrishnan, G. Rangarajan and the late Prof. S. Swaminathan. Prof. M. S. Ananth -- who was to later become director of IIT Madras -- was also very encouraging of my decision and was great to talk to,” he says Prof. Alladi Sitaram, a retired mathematician from the Indian Statistical Institute is another of Dr Ananthanarayan’s role models.

Dr. Ananthanarayan has published a number of papers on his work over the years, as well as general-interest science articles. IISc conducts a training program, called 'Outreach' project, every summer for promising students from India and abroad, selected through a rigorous competitive process. Dr. Ananthanarayan used to work with students over the summer break as a part of this project. To aspiring students, he wishes to give this piece of advice: “We must work very hard, think hard and also learn a lot of lateral skills. Computer skills are a must today irrespective of what one may want to do, along with mathematics.”

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About Me

Professor & Former Chairman,
Centre for High Energy Physics,
Indian Intitute of Science
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are strictly my own and my employer can in no way be held responsible for them.